HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the world's largest publishing companies and, alongside Hachette, Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, is part of the "Big Five" English-language publishing companies.[1] Headquartered in New York City, the company is a subsidiary of News Corp. The company name is a combination of Harper & Row—an American publishing company acquired in 1987, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company—and UK publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded 1819), acquired in 1990. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray.[2] HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The company publishes many different imprints, both former independent publishing houses and new imprints.

In 1989, Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and the publisher was combined with Harper & Row, which NewsCorp had acquired two years earlier. In addition to the simplified and merged name, the logo for HarperCollins was derived from the torch logo for Harper and Row, and the fountain logo for Collins, which were combined into a stylized set of flames atop waves.

In 2011, HarperCollins announced they had agreed to acquire the publisher Thomas Nelson.[4] The purchase was completed on July 11, 2012 with an announcement that Thomas Nelson would operate independently given the position it has in Christian book publishing.[5]

Jane Friedman was CEO for HarperCollins from 1997 to 2008. Notable management figures include Lisa Sharkey, current senior vice president and director of creative development and Barry Winkleman from 1989 to 1994.

In December 2013, a federal judge approved a settlement of the antitrust claims, in which HarperCollins and the other publishers paid into a fund that provided credits to customers who had overpaid for books due to the price-fixing.[7]

It was announced to employees privately and then later in the day publicly on Monday, November 5, 2012 that HarperCollins is closing its remaining 2 U.S. warehouses, in order to merge shipping and warehousing operations with R.R. Donnelley in Indiana. The Scranton, PA warehouse will close in September 2013 and a Nashville, TN warehouse, under the name (D.B.A.) Thomas Nelson (which distributes the religious arm of HarperCollins/Zondervan Books), in winter of 2013. Several office positions and departments will continue to work for HarperCollins in Scranton, but in a new location.[8]

The Scranton warehouse closing will eliminate approximately 200 jobs, and the Nashville warehouse closing will eliminate up to 500 jobs (exact number of distribution employees is unknown)[9]

HarperCollins previously closed 2 U.S. warehouses, one in Williamsport, PA in 2011 and another in Grand Rapids, MI in 2012.[10] “We have taken a long-term, global view of our print distribution and are committed to offering the broadest possible reach for our authors," said HarperCollins Chief Executive Brian Murray, according to Publishers Weekly."We are retooling the traditional distribution model to ensure we can competitively offer the entire HarperCollins catalog to customers regardless of location.” Company officials attribute the closings and mergers to the rapidly growing demand for e-book formats and the decline in print purchasing.[citation needed]

HarperCollins maintains the backlist of many of the books originally published by their many merged imprints, in addition to having picked up new authors since the merger. Authors published originally by Harper include Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters and William Makepeace Thackeray. Authors published originally by Collins include H. G. Wells, Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien. This is a list of some of the more noted books, and series, published by HarperCollins and their various imprints and merged publishing houses.

HarperCollins has over 30 book imprints, most of which are based in the United States.[13] Collins still exists as an imprint, chiefly for wildlife and natural history books, field guides, as well as English and bilingual dictionaries based on the Bank of English, a large corpus of contemporary English texts.

On 8 February 2013 it was announced that some parts of the Collins non-fiction imprint would be merged with the HarperPress imprint to form the new William Collins imprint.[14]

HarperCollins imprints (current and defunct, including imprints that existed prior to various mergers), include:

In order to both boost book sales and reach the online market, HarperCollins has created a browsing feature on its website, whereby customers can read selected excerpts from books before purchasing.[18][19] There are some concerns among publishers with this approach because they feel that the online books could be exploited by file-sharing.[20] In addition, excerpts of books are also available to mobile phone users.[21] HarperCollins were first to market with an innovative approach to slushpile management with the introduction of the authonomy website. From 2009 to 2010, they operated Bookarmy, a social networking site.

At the beginning of October 2013, the company announced a partnership with online digital library Scribd. The official statement revealed that the "majority" of the HarperCollins US and HarperCollins Christian catalogs will be available in Scribd's subscription service. Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at HarperCollins, explained to the media that the deal represents the first time that the publisher has released such a large portion of its catalog.[22]

The HarperCollins Speakers Bureau (also known as HCSB) is the first lecture agency to be created by a major publishing house.[23] It was launched in May 2005[23] as a division of HarperCollins to book paid speaking engagements for the authors HarperCollins, and its sister companies, publish. Andrea Rosen is the director.[24]

HarperCollins announced HarperStudio in 2008 as a "new, experimental unit... that will eliminate the traditional profit distributions to authors. The long-established author advances and bookseller returns has not proved to be very profitable to either the author or the publisher. The approach HarperStudio is now taking is to offer little or no advance, but instead to split the profit 50% (rather than the industry standard 15%), with the author." The division was headed by Bob Miller, previously the founding publisher of Hyperion, the adult books division of the Walt Disney Company.[26][27] HarperStudio folded in March 2010 after Miller left for Workman Publishing.[28]

HarperCollins India was started in 2003 as a joint venture between Living Media and HarperCollins. This combination makes HarperCollins India a major publisher in India. HarperCollins took full control of the venture at the end of 2012.[29]

If I Did It was a book written by O.J. Simpson about his alleged murder of Nicole Simpson, which was planned as a HarperCollins title, and which attracted considerable controversy and a legal battle over publication.

In August 2010, the company became embroiled in a legal battle with the BBC after a book it was due to publish, later identified as the forthcoming autobiography of racing driver Ben Collins, revealed the identity of The Stig from Top Gear.[30] In his blog, Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman accused HarperCollins of "hoping to cash in" on the BBC's intellectual property, describing the publishers as "a bunch of chancers".[31] On September 1 the BBC's request for an injunction preventing the book from being published was turned down, effectively confirming the book's revelation that "The Stig" was indeed Collins.[32]

The company became embroiled in controversy in 1998 after it was revealed it blocked Chris Patten's (the last British governor of Hong Kong) book East and West after a direct intervention by the then-CEO of News International, Rupert Murdoch.[33] It was later revealed by Stuart Proffitt, the editor who had worked on the book for HarperCollins, that this intervention was designed to appease the Chinese authorities- of whom the book was critical- as Murdoch intended to extend his business empire into China and did not wish to cause problems there by allowing the book to be published.[34] Murdoch's intervention caused both Proffitt's resignation from the company and outrage from international media outside of News International. Chris Patten later published with Macmillan Publishing, initially in America, where it carried the logo "The book that Rupert Murdoch refused to publish".[35] After a successful legal campaign against HarperCollins, Patten went on to publish the book in the UK in September 1998 after accepting a sum of £500,000 and receiving an apology from Rupert Murdoch.[36]

In March 2011, HarperCollins announced it would distribute eBooks to libraries with DRM enabled to delete the item after being lent 26 times.[37][38] HarperCollins has drawn criticism of this plan, in particular its likening eBooks, which are purely digital, to traditional paperback trade books, which wear over time.[39][40]

In December 2014, The Tablet reported that an atlas published for Middle East schools did not label Israel on a map of the Middle East.[41] A representative for Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, explained that including Israel would have been “unacceptable” to their customers in the Gulf and the omission was in line with “local preferences”.[42][43] The company later apologized and destroyed all the books.[44][45]